“I think mostly it’s around what other people had done to really get this thing from start to finish.” – Evan Kelsay in today’s Tip 1338
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Evan Kelsey on Linkedin
Mega Deal Hack: The Internal Sale
Evan Kelsay on Sales Success Stories Interview
2022 Sales Success Summit
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. For today’s throwback Thursday tip I’ve got a piece of the first interview I did with Evan Kelsay in episode 56 of the Sales Success Stories podcast after he closed a massive deal to put him at 800% of his number for the year, and he’s since closed mega-deal after mega-deal. Here he is:
Scott Ingram: So let’s go back to the deal cycle that you ran. What part of that are you the most proud of? What went the best?
Evan Kelsay: Good question. Well, I guess in terms of things, there’s a lot of things that I’m really proud at. I think mostly it’s around what other people had done to really get this thing from start to finish. And because Seismic has this great sales culture, they were really open my inside team supporting me was really open to doing the work necessary to focus in on one account. It was a big risk for them and quite frankly for me to spend the majority of my time this year on one deal. And luckily each week as I would kind of update my leadership on the deal. I would say, “Just so you know, I’m spending the majority of my time on this deal.” And to their credit, each week they said, “No, we think based on your process, based on what you’re telling us, based on our experience or hardened sales experience, we believe there’s a there and there. And continue on and if it doesn’t work out, we will figure out a way to take care of you. But we believe that this is a potentially transformational deal for the company. Keep working on it.”And everybody involved had to put an extra effort and kind of make that same risk.
The most fantastic sales engineer I could ever ask for, spend an enormous amount of time this year demoing to everybody and really following up with them and helping them fully understand the technical capabilities of the platform. And there was some internal selling that we had to do because quite frankly, we had to change a couple of we had to add a couple of things to what we’re doing from a product set standpoint to be able to close the deal. Our technical organization had to make that our leadership were really open and generous with their connections at the company and really helping make kind of higher level intros or even sometimes intros that just were informational interviews so that I could kind of take that pain back to our leadership.
And I think at some point in Q2, there just came this moment when I was updating my champion every week of all the divisions that we were talking to, what those conversations were like. And I think at that point, at that moment, he really got excited. He really got excited about, I think it gave him permission to really go after this. And to his credit, it’s a very large company, so if you’re at the senior leadership level, there’s probably a lot of people that are content to sit back and not really rock the boat, and those that do, put in jeopardy a very safe job.
And to my champion’s credit, I think he really understood the value of what we do and we’ve done a great job of as an organization, really conveying unique value, differentiation, and business outcome to what we do, but at the same time can be equally as important, he had to have the confidence that there was enough groundswell and enough pain and also popularity of what we do that he could actually put his neck out there and really go to bat for us internally in a highly matrix, highly political organization.
Scott Ingram: Next week Evan will be presenting at the Sales Success Summit on this Mega Deal Hack: The Internal Sale. If you’ll click over to DailySales.Tips/1338 we’ll have a link where you can register to get access to the recording of that presentation.
Of course, we’ll also have a link to our complete conversation back in 2018. Once you’ve clicked over there and filled out the form, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!